The Shape Shifter -- Sam Stages Exhibit Of Cindy Sherman Works With The Photographer Herself On Provocative Display

------------------------------- Art Review

"Allegories" An exhibit of photographs by Cindy Sherman. Through January 1999. Seattle Art Museum, 100 University St., Seattle. 206-654-3100. -------------------------------

Artist William Wegman got famous in the 1970s by dressing up his dog, Man Ray, in costumes, then photographing the handsome brown Weimaraner in all kinds of very human situations. Cindy Sherman made a name - a very big name - for herself in the 1980s by doing the same sort of thing. But instead of using a dog, Sherman dresses herself up in her photographic dramas, careful to reveal nothing about who's behind the disguise.

Making up for lost time, Seattle Art Museum is featuring the city's first Sherman exhibit, "Allegories," a group of 34 photographs curated by Trevor Fairbrother. Because so much of Sherman's work is loaned out to other exhibits, it left slim pickings for SAM. To beef up the show, Fairbrother did what he's best at - put together a context for the work that is startling and strong. Fairbrother chose a selection of related photographs from SAM's collection, including works by Diane Arbus, Ralph Meatyard and a recently purchased piece by David Robbins.

Then, in lieu of an expensive and redundant catalog, he commissioned a comic book by Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, which was printed at Seattle's Fantagraphics Books. Grennan and Sperandio incorporated some of Sherman's images into their updated versions of Grimm's fairytales.

Like comic-strip stars, Sherman's people are deliberate caricatures, meant to look fake. She started out in the late 1970s shooting herself as a starlet in black-and-white scenes reminiscent of foreign movie stills. Stilted and ironic, the images won the approval of feminists for subverting the standard portrayals of women in film.

After a foray into her own brand of fashion photography, on commission for Interview and French Vogue, Sherman began playing off historical images in large-format chromogenic color prints. She made elaborate compositions, projecting slides as a backdrop for her mindboggling character transformations (she impersonates men as easily as women). Her shape-shifting, gender-bending personae made Sherman the heroine of post-modern art. By controlling and performing every aspect of her presentation and warping the sense of art historical images, Sherman is the consummate deconstructivist.

The trouble is, once you've deconstructed something, all you have left is a fleeting intellectual satisfaction: After a while, irony gets sterile. Sherman's photographs leaves one craving emotional substance, something real.

Maybe for that reason, one of the show's most compelling images is one of her Disaster scenes, "Untitled #175," the remains of a huge cake orgy that, from a distance, looks like a splashy, multicolor abstraction. Up close it's a stomach-churning sea of chocolate-cake remnants, vomit and oozing eclairs strewn on a carpet. Amid it all is a cheap pair of sunglasses with the artist's disguised, gape-mouth face reflected in the lenses: a scene of death from surfeit of sweetness. (This photograph, by the way, is on loan from the Donald Young gallery, newly relocated back to Chicago from Seattle).

The real substance of this exhibit comes from comparing Sherman's work with the less flashy photographs by Arbus and Meatyard that are hung nearby.

One revealing juxtaposition is Sherman's jarring untitled Madonna - the artist describes it as "the big Madonna with plastic (breasts) . . . based on a work by a French painter whose name I forget" - with Meatyard's quietly resonant "Madonna."

Meatyard's black-and-white image is a ponytailed girl and a woman facing each other in dark profile, haloed in the broken light of venetian blinds. The girl has her lips pressed to her mother's womb. The ambiguity of the gesture encompasses everything from sexuality, to reverence for the divine, to tender innocence. For me, Meatyard's "Madonna" has a soul that Sherman's work, with all its layers of smartness, can't touch.